Question

I am using casperjs and following is the code

var casper = require('casper').create();
var x = require('casper').selectXPath;

casper.start('http://google.co.in/', function() {
    // search for 'casperjs' from google form
    this.test.assertExists(x('//*[@type="text"]'), 'the element exists');

});
casper.run(function() {
    // echo results in some pretty fashion
    this.echo('').exit();
});

it wasn’t able to find any element with attribute type as text though there are plenty.

This is the output I get

FAIL the element exists
#    type: assertExists
#    subject: false
#    selector: {"type":"xpath","path":"//*[@type=\"text\"]"}

Answer 1

Google has been known to not be bot-friendly. In order for this to work, you must set the UserAgent.

This was tested under CasperJS-1.0.0 and PhantomJS-1.8.0

var casper = require('casper').create({
  pageSettings: {
    userAgent: 'Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.21 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1349.2 Safari/537.21'
  }
});
var x = require('casper').selectXPath;

casper.start('http://google.co.in/', function() {
  // search for 'casperjs' from google form
  this.test.assertExists(x('//*[@type="text"]'), 'the element exists');
  this.test.assertExists({
    type: 'xpath',
    path: '//*[@type="text"]'
  }, 'the element exists');
});

casper.run(function() {
  // echo results in some pretty fashion
  this.echo('').exit();
});

You can visit http://whatsmyuseragent.com/ to see what your current UserAgent is.

Update: Removed CasperJS-1.0.0 code in favor of backwards-compatible code.